By the time this "goes to print," Zero Dark Thirty will have hit the screens (opening on December 19), and one theme that I am sure will dominate the echo chamber (as it did in the run-up to the opening -- see Tom Carson in The America Prospect and Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian) has to do with whether the movie-makers are apologists for torture and the regime(s) that condoned it. I have a different take on this, which is why I re-offer these two pieces. Kathryn Bigelow and her crew owe no debt of truth to anyone because they happen to be grounding their narrative in something historical. She and crew are not journalists or historians but narrative story-tellers and not are bound to tell any sort of "truth" at all. In fact, they do a disservice to themselves and their craft if they restrict themselves to verifiable truths, to the "based on a true story" tag-line. And in any case, the story of bin Laden is a made-up story anyway, much like a myth or fable, with a character named "bin Laden" and a character named "Obama" and so on. She can torque that fable anyway she wants and does not have to answer to anyone about it.

Of course, a movie without the torture would probably not sell as well (we crave the things that make us cringe), and in that sense, she is something of an apologist for it, if only because she accepts the dominant ideological framework for The Tale of Bin Laden and Obama -- not a criticism, just an observation. Spielberg's Lincoln does the same thing (though in his usual fashion, he does it through his creepy animatronics -- isn't Day-Lewis' Lincoln just another version of Haley Joel Osment's David in A.I.?), that is, makes the dominant ideology palatable and parsable to the helots who pay the taxes (and blood and bone) for it. Thus, "Necro-Political Theatre," a call to pry the dead hand of our ruling class and their death-based obsessions from our throats.

Michael Bedttencourt    

Originally Published July 2006

I recently saw columbinus at the New York Theatre Workshop, a "Living Newspaper"-style examination of the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. One of the first things the actors do as they come onstage is to remind the audience (actually, re-remind, since the program had already made this point) that what they are about to see is based on transcripts, interviews, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, it's based on a true story.

And I think: So what?

I think this partly out of a reflex of resistance to being told how I should respond to what I am going to be shown. Because the phrase "based on a true story" is a protocol about how I should respond -- otherwise, why foreground it? And an essential element of a response-protocol based on the "authentic" (assuming we know what that word means) is "You cannot disbelieve." That is, you don't have a choice about how you respond to the story because it is true, it happened, and your imagination will not be allowed to gainsay or re-draft its reality by saying "but what if....."

But not only does "based on a true story" strait-jacket the imagination, it also lays down a claim that what is true is also, by virtue of its trueness, inherently dramatic. There is, however, no correlation between a true story and dramatic truth. The true story of Columbine -- that is, the story laid down according to its facts -- is surely filled with enterprises of great pitch and moment. And columbinus lays them out by using a structure and approach that employs all sorts of what the reviews call "theatrical devices": streaming video from a hand-held camera, a subtitled audio tape of the 911 call from the school library, choreographed movements based on a popular songs, and so on. 

However, these "devices" are just story-telling aids, variations on the textbook and the talking head. Their use does not automatically create a dramatic narrative. And even if they could create real drama, they aren't allowed to because everything happening on the stage is in service to "the true story," which means that the stage-action is pre-determined in its narration and destination, and such predetermination poisons dramatic truth.

A name exists for what columbinus does: documentary theatre. One book, Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft by Gary Fisher Dawson, defines documentary theatre as a "dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations" and that in America documentary theatre has often been used as "an alternative to conventional journalism." And that's the rub for me, this confusion of mediums: if one wants to do journalism, then do journalism. If one wants to do documentaries, make a documentary film. Theatre is not the medium for the documentary/journalistic impulse.

And why not? The answer to this question takes into account my own evolution as a playwright. I first began writing plays from a documentary impulse. I agreed with Emma Goldman that modern drama was a powerful vehicle for bringing radical social and political ideas to audiences -- in short, that the playwright acted as an instructor. Which implied that there are people who need instruction, i.e., the audience. Which also implied an arrogant assumption on the playwright's part about the audience, i.e., that they were under-informed.

I no longer think like this, or at least not a lot like this. Because I've come to see that theatre's province, theatre's theatre, so to speak, is actually quite small and specific: it is to examine the state of the human heart under the pressure of knowing that death lurks just around the corner. And this examination uses an equally small and specific set of tools, actually only one tool: protagonists must fall apart in order to find out what glues their parts together, and the audience must experience this change as a visceral change (i.e., a shift in the viscera) without being lessoned by the playwright as to the change's meaning, purpose, direction, or usefulness.

This doesn't mean that the playwright mimics reality (assuming that we can even define "mimic" and "reality") but shapes it through conflict, reversal, restoration, reoccurrence -- in short, by using all the usual "devices," the playwright creates a staged reality, resembling "real" reality but not its cognate.

Documentary theatre pretends to "stage" its story, but it doesn't, really. The staging is a masque for a lesson, and it's the lesson -- and its attached assumption that knowledge somehow makes people better people -- that matters most to the documentary theatre-maker: "You should know this, for we believe you will be better for knowing it. We believe you have an emptiness, and we are here to fill it." This is not to say that documentary theatre is a pleasureless grind -- it can be affecting in cognitive and emotional ways. But in the end, documentary theatre is quite static, the complete opposite of good theatre's being dynamic.

One last point, related to documentary theatre's static nature, and this answers the question (if someone were to ask me this question), "Well, how would you tell this story?" Documentary theatre, in its lesson-giving to the audience, resists implicating that audience in the moral disasters it seeks to explore and explain. We learn about them, but we don't become part of the equation that the documentary sets out to clarify why they occur. Yes, in columbinus, there were nods to the notion that somehow "we" failed the two young butchers, but that was just platitudinizing -- nothing in the performance asked the audience to really believe that, sacrifice themselves to that idea. In short, the documentary theatre piece really leaves the audience in the same moral and spiritual place in which it entered the theatre, despite the fact that it aims, through its lesson, to get people to amend themselves. But this is as it has to be if you're telling a true story: the strictures of the true story won't allow too much play of the fictive imagination, and without that, there is no imaginative way to pollinate an audience with what it's observing.

What would I do? First, I'd strip away the Columbine reality completely and simply have two young people who want to murder their mates, existing in some undefined time and undefined place. Then I would examine the moral lesson that I wouldn't want people to put into practice: that it felt good to do what they did because of the power they had. I would defend doing this by quoting the playwright Terence: "I am a man; nothing human is alien to me." And I would also try to tell this story in a way would at least make some in the audience whisper to themselves "I, too, have wished I could feel that same power," to tell this story so that we could hear the contra-dictions in our mind's ears about two simultaneous and overlapping true stories: they are monsters and they are human, they disgust me and they are like me. No closure, no summation, no release -- just a ponder on the messiness of our moral lives.

Is this what Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris thought about/felt/mused upon? I don't know, and I don't care because if the facts get in the way of the story, then it's time to jettison the facts in favor of taking a journey through the inconvenient lifescape called the human being. There are more useful and interesting truths than the facts.

Michael Bedttencourt       

Originally Published October 2007

On Tuesday, September 11, Brian Stack, the doggedly self-promoting mayor of Union City, NJ, where I live, held an unveiling ceremony for a 9/11 memorial planted on a triangle of inhospitable public real estate dubbed "Liberty Plaza," bordered by two major urban roadways that are dangerous to cross to get to the site. The memorial itself is a fairly generic slab of polished dark-grey stone etched with a picture of the twin towers and the usual boilerplate about "we honor" and "we will never forget." At the bottom of the stone, in letters as prominent as the eulogy to the dead, is a citation that this memorial was commissioned by Mayor Brian Stack, etcetera, etcetera. Call it a lithic form of campaign advertising.

To the right of the slab is a slice of a grey-painted angled steel I-beam jammed into a granite base incised with the phrase "World Trade Center." (I don't know if the I-beam is an actual piece of either tower, but observers are clearly encouraged to believe that it is.) All of this necro-political sculpture is surrounded by a sternum-high wrought-iron fence placed just far enough back to keep any human hand from actually having a tactile connection to the memorialized dead. The artifact is meant to be observed, not cherished, to be official rather than personal, and what is meant to be observed, as is true of most of the memorial sculpture in this genre, is the political power of the living to define the memories that become the exclusive (and excluding) record of the historical event.

This scramble to (re)direct the peoples' gaze toward the meaning of 9/11 reaches something of a frenzy each year in New York on the actual date because, ironically enough, no one can agree on what the six-year old event means. That is, no one person or group has been able to gather the powers -- moral, political, financial -- to emboss the event with an official profile (the way, for instance, World War II is now completely encased in the armor of the "good war" and the "greatest generation," thanks to Ken Burns and Tom Brokaw) . So, in the interim, those who can appropriate it for their own purposes: the President to legitimize an illegitimate war, the governor and mayor to show the world New York's "resilience," Giuliani to promote the myth of his (non-existent) competence, the families of those who died to impose an endless regime of grief and shame. Each of these, and many others, have, by now, dramaturged the event to their own specifications, honed the stage business to a razor-sharp timing, and produced a long and successful run promoting a managed message of doom and uplift. Just like our intrepid and insipid Mayor Stack, they have turned a day of tragedy into cultural and political kitsch.

The fact is that six years out from that day, no one really knows what that day means. Apart from engineering studies that document the physics of the collapse (and all of those are challenged by purveyors of various conspiracies), and the studies that will continue to show how incompetent and blindered was our vaunted expensive intelligence apparatus, September 11, 2001, has deliquesced into a memory, and as with all memories suffers from the intermittent amnesia and selective breeding for message that afflicts all human memory-making.

And what does "means" mean anyway? In one way, 9/11 has no meaning at all, that is, it is not a term in a dictionary that one can look up and get its denotation and connotation. 9/11 is more like a Rorschach print, an arbitrary fractal image upon which people project whatever happens to be roiling around inside of them. This is the only definition of "means" that makes sense in this case.

But this projection of what is inside to the outside is not without some cultural and political discipline and instruction. To be sure, part of the projected package may include completely private fears and hatreds, but these are shined through the larger lens of the indoctrinations and tutorings we have all sculpted, and had sculpted for us, into that thing we call a "self" and an "I." Thus, the importance of creating a "Theatre of 9/11," as did our savvy Mayor Stack, in order to capture what attention-spans, and thus political influence, is out there to be snared.

To be sure, this is cynical manipulation, but it is on a continuum of theatre-making, not its antithesis. All theatre, as does all art, seeks to manipulate a response out of an audience -- otherwise, why go to the bother of making it? (Even if artists make art for themselves alone, I assume that they, the audience of one, want to be moved by what they make.) That continuum can run from what I call "journalistic theatre" (using a current event to teach the audience about that current event) to the absurdist wing, where the audience is meant to be challenged, even chastised, by bafflement. "Necro-political theatre" obviously falls somewhere in-between, though it borrows elements from both extremes: it grounds itself in a current event in order to instruct us about that event (even if that "current" event is six years old -- part of necro-political dramaturgy is to try to immortalize something that is, in itself, time-specific) but also (though probably unintentionally, since necro-political theatre has no irony in it) absurdizes the situation by grafting onto it all sorts of ersatz mythology and religiosity that tip it into the realm of the fantastical.

All of this might be consigned to the academic world (fodder for PhD dissertations) if it didn't have such ramifying repercussions in the "real" world. Necro-political theatre got us into Iraq and may propel us into Iran. It has savaged our civil liberties and hollowed out any will for radical (even moderate) social and political change. And the "enemy" deploys its own necro-political theatre as well, doing a far better job at it than Bush's clumsy apparatchiks.

One cost for living in a virtualized world like ours, where image and a kind of pre-literary, infantile narrative model prevails over nuance and close reading, is an increase in gullibility and destruction. An antidote? Some form of theatrical criticism that peels away the excrescences and shows the nakedness of the Emperor and his empire. And it needs to be a theatrical criticism, using a theatre vocabulary and a dramaturgical logic to lance the boil. Frank Rich is an expert at this (in part because he has been a theatre critic for a long time), as are writers like Alexander Cockburn and Katha Pollitt. But we can't leave it to them since they will never have the reach of a William Kristol or a Rush Limbaugh. Each of us needs to become a savaging theatrical critic of the necro-politics that drive our polity today, or else there will be no polity left to criticize and thus redeem.